A business organization may use sales tools, such as a value estimating tool, to compare similar products offered by the business organization and its competitors. For example, the value estimating tool may be configured to estimate the return on investment, net present value and profit potentials of two or more products, and compare these products based on the results. Such a value estimating process usually uses a large amount of data input, including, for example, data related to product usage, transaction prices, various types of costs, etc. This data may be extracted from a variety of sources, such as, internal reports of the business organization, publications, websites, etc. When the value estimating tool is demonstrated by sales personnel to a client, the sales personnel may want to show sources of the input data to the client as proof or the client may want to check the sources of the input data to verify the validity of the data. Furthermore, the sales personnel may want to show, or the client may want to see, the actual source documents electronically when the value estimating tool is being demonstrated. Therefore, it is beneficial that the computer demonstration tools, such as value estimating tool, can enable data verification by providing links to source data files and/or web pages.
A method and system developed to automatically update a database of a comparative shopping system is disclosed in U.S. Patent Publication No. 2007/0073599 to Perry et al. (“the '599 publication”). In particular, the '599 publication discloses a method to automatically update the database containing product-related information. The method may include extracting product-related information from a plurality of merchant web pages, normalizing the product-related information into records, and storing the records in the database. The method disclosed by the '599 publication may further include comparing a plurality of stored records and updating the database based on the most current record.
Although the method and system of the '599 publication may alleviate some of the problems of existing systems, it may still be suboptimal. That is, because the sources are not saved in relation to the records, after the information is extracted from the merchant web pages, users of the comparative shopping system may not verify the validity of the records. Furthermore, since the source web pages where the information is extracted from are not stored, users of the system disclosed by the '599 publication may not be able to link to these web pages and review additional information on the web page that is relevant to the product. In addition, the user can not control which websites and data are displayed.
The system and method of the present disclosure are directed towards overcoming one or more of the constraints set forth above.